Stranahan's Colorado Whiskey Review

Tonight is another review of a bottle I'm powering through to make room in the bunker for the impending bourbon monsoon this fall. I first heard about Stranahan's when I took a tour of their distillery back in 2012 on a trip to Denver. Here's a picture of my tour group, that's me in the striped shirt. The tour was pretty cool and the guides were very knowledgeable - our guide wasn't just a guide but someone who was very active in their distilling process. I bought a bottle as a memento because at the time it was not sold in my home state of TN. That bottle was the new post-proximo style bottle and not the one I am reviewing here. This bottle is a pre-prixmo bottle that I later found collecting dust last year.

47.0% ABV; Aged "a minimum of 2 years"; Batch #62; Distilled 09/10/2008, $60

Whoever bottled it was listening to CCR. I think the current music is a nice personal touch on the label.

The nose is unbelievably fruity. I tend to get lot of intense banana flavors in young bourbons. I would say this is similar except replace the bananas with grapes, prunes, and raisins. It might be the fruitiest nose I've ever experienced in a non specialty finished whiskey.

The taste is a wild ride with lots of odd flavors for someone who usually drinks bourbon whiskey. I know the mashbill here is primarily barley like scotch and while I don't have a lot of scotch experience outside of Islays this tastes nothing like scotch either. It's intensely fruity - all of the notes from the nose are heavily reinforced. Raisins, prunes, nugrape soda, blackberry wine. With all those comes lots of inherent sweetness. Towards the finish though comes perhaps my favorite note about Stranahan's: coffee. I swear the finish tastes like dark roasted coffee. I'm not one to add water to something below 100 proof but I have added water to this in the past and I know water makes the coffee note even more present. That combination of notes is really, really odd but rather remarkable in a batshit crazy way.

This is a very strange one. It's really good in some ways but it's also not so great once you pick it apart. On the fruit scale it's off the charts and coffee note is unlike anything I've ever experience in a whiskey. That's also all it really offers as those two elements really dominate everything else. It's worth buying a bottle at least once to see how it suits you but I'd probably pass on future bottles at this price point. Having said that, I would love to revisit this at 4, 6, or 8 years. I think it has real potential if they would let the wood smooth out some of the odd characteristics and give it some layers.

Rating: B-